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CHICAGO – Trey Burke scored 21 points and No. 6 Michigan beat Penn State 83-66 in the first round of the Big Ten tournament on Thursday, avenging a shocking loss to the Nittany Lions during the regular season.
Tim Hardaway Jr. and Nick Stauskas each had 15 points for the Wolverines (26-6), who will play fourth-seeded Wisconsin in the quarterfinals on Friday. Freshman reserve Mitch McGary added 10 points and 11 rebounds, helping Michigan to a 28-15 advantage in second-chance points.
D.J. Newbill scored 20 points for Penn State (10-21), which faded after a fast start. Sasa Borovnjak scored 10 of his 15 points in the first half, and Ross Travis finished with 12 points and 11 rebounds.


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Loatheb was added in the Curse of Naxxramas Adventure. He is available from Wing 2 - The Plague Quarter which opened on July 29th, 2014, and is obtained after defeating the adventure boss Loatheb.
Adventure Guide
Need help conquering the Curse of Naxxramas Adventure to obtain Loatheb? Head on over to our Curse of Naxxramas Adventure Guide!

subset: commoncrawl


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Before becoming a Lead Park Angel with Charleston Parks Conservancy (CPC), Jessica Hall had already firmly rooted herself in the volunteer world. Inspired by her mother, who has her hands in half a dozen nonprofits, the 27-year-old technical analyst has taught gymnastics for Special Olympics, worked at Dee Norton Lowcountry Children's Center, and coordinated blood drives with the American Red Cross. She was, however, a little green when it came to good gardening. But the chance to sprout a new skill intrigued this go-getter, who quickly flourished under the Park Angels' nurturing. For the past two years, she and fellow winged warriors have dug in to plant Etiwan Park, Marion Square, Fountain Park, Colonial Lake, and more of the 120-plus green spaces across Charleston. "I've discovered that I love weeding," laughs Jessica. "It's good for my type-A personality."
Her hardy drive has also helped lay the groundwork for public events like the kid-focused Teddy Bear Picnic and March's Park Week, for which Jessica organized a "Bagels 'n' Barks" breakfast and evening "Yappy Hour" at area dog parks. And she regularly heads out to community gatherings such as the Charleston Green Fair, all in an effort to cultivate awareness of CPC's mission to grow the quality and usage of the city's parks. "Our parks really show off this place's beauty," she says. "They're the core representation of the city and its people, so I'm helping to put Charleston's best foot forward."


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- Ease of Growing
- Moderate
- Grown as
- Annual
- Days to Maturity
- 53-56 (Spring/Summer)
- Growing Habit
- Bush
- Hardiness
- Tender
Beans are temperature sensitive and shouldn't be planted until the soil has reached at least 65 degrees F.
- Crops
- Spring Transplant, Spring, Summer
- Growing Season
- Short, Long
- Cultivar Type
- Early
- Growing Conditions
- Warm, Hot
Beans like a warm sunny spot. They are not at all hardy and any frost will kill them. These tall plants are vulnerable to being blown over, so should be sheltered from high winds and supported on a stable and secure structure.
- Outdoor Growing Temp
- Min Outdoor Soil Temp
Dark and Light-Seeded Beans: Dark-seeded beans are more resistant to rotting in cool soil than light-seeded beans. Beans need a minimum soil temperature of 65°F (18°C) to germinate well, otherwise rotting may occur. Around 80˚ F is ideal.
- Start Indoors
- Yes
- Start Outdoors
- Yes
- Light
- Water
- Moderate
Beans should have evenly moist soil at all times. Water lightly at planting, medium at flowering, and heavily throughout harvest time. Avoid overhead watering which can promote disease.
- Feeder
- Moderate
Low nitrogen. Moderate potassium. Moderate phosphorous.
Beans don't need a lot of nitrogen in the soil because they fix their own. In fact, if there is a lot in the soil they won't go to the trouble of fixing it. They do need plenty of potassium and phosphorus though.
They are sometimes planted after a crop that was heavily amended, or after a winter cover crop.
- Suitability
- Small Gardens?
- Yes
- Containers?
- Yes-
- Attracts beneficial insects?
- No
- Color
- Green
- Fruit Size
- - 5.0"
- Plant Height
- 16.0 - 24.0"
- Plant Diameter
- 12.0 - 18.0"
- Hardiness Zone
- 3-11
- Disease Resistance
- -
- Taste Profile
Refined delicate flavor, very tender.
- Rotation Group
- Soil Builders and Cleaners: Legumes + Corn + Potatoes


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Phase I- 2014
2014 Highlights
The Innovate Parks & Rec Taskforce awarded 17 ideas! Browse highlights from 2014:
- American Indian Village
- Focus Forward Young Adult Occupational Program
- 10 Things Every Young Man Should Know
American Indian Village
Tonya Johnson & The Bladensburg Waterfront Park Staff
The American Indian Village at Patuxent River Park was a replicated from the Eastern Woodland Indian Village giving visitors opportunities to experience the history of the Indigenous peoples of Prince George's County, Maryland and the surrounding areas. Built largely by local teenage volunteers, the village replicates eastern woodland villages. Different items at the village, which was built over 18 months, include a 40-foot long longhouse, a wigwam, archaeological exhibits, a garden, and stations showing the processes for hide tanning, net weaving and mat making.
Focus Forward Young Adult Occupational Program
Antoinette Battle, Leigh Ann Eckenrode, Valerie Lewis Taylor
Ms. Battle and Ms. Eckenrode submitted this program initiative as an inventive idea to encompass an under-served population of youth, ages of 16 to 24, whom often go unrecognized within the parks and recreation facilities. The ten-week Focus Forward program concentrated on college and career preparation as well as social and financial enrichment for youth. Twenty participants attended career and college fairs, goal and communication workshops and one on one lifestyle coaching. At the completion of the ten-week course, participants experienced a graduation ceremony and celebration. Ms. Battle and Ms. Eckenrode have plans to expand the successful program and open the application process to more participating recreation facilities in the future.
10 Things Every Young Man Should Know
Natalie Smart
This 12-week program designed for boys' ages 14-17 was to provide essential life skills to under-served and resource lacking populations. As part of the Transforming Neighborhood Initiative, the program was emplaced to strategically teach life skills to young men in order to improve their chances of success as they transition from adolescence into adulthood. 20 youth participated in the free program. Ms. Smart collaborated with several departments including Maintenance, Park Police, Public Affairs and Marketing, Sports Health and Wellness and Central Area Division to develop this program and make it a success.


text: Thank you for visiting our website. Our commitment to serve you better transcends our facility. We invite you to browse our website. We strive to make our families and visitors feel comfortable while paying respects to their lost loved ones, and we make considerable efforts to maintain our focus on the high standards expected of a place of tribute.


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Backstage Footage of Aerosmith Reveals Band in Good Spirits
The members of Aerosmith may have engaged in a war of words during their long layoff, with the most recent battle coming during a profile on '60 Minutes.' However, a video shot before the band's first concert of their 'Global Warming' tour shows Steven Tyler engaged in some good old-fashioned chop-busting on bassist Tom Hamilton.
Wandering through the corridors backstage at the Target Center in Minneapolis, the singer is trying to explain something he said to an off-camera member of their crew and figure out whether he should wear the brim of his hat up or down. However, he is soon distracted by Hamilton down the hallway.
"Oh, really? I'm wearing this, but you're wearing those?" Calling out for the camera that's been following him, Tyler points towards Hamilton's silver boots as the bassist laughs. "Look at this s—! I'm the freak? I'm the freak? That's too good, man. That's too funny."
In case you were wondering, the glowing object in Hamilton's hand is a gyroscopic exercise ball. It is designed to build strength in the hands and wrists, and protect against carpal tunnel syndrome and other repetitive strain injuries that could result from playing a musical instrument.
Watch Steven Tyler Make Fun of Tom Hamilton's Footwear


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Will Your Insurance Cover Kill Trauma
Cleaning up after a traumatic event is challenging, both physically and emotionally. Biohazard remediation or deodorizing companies in Canton can reduce the pressure from your shoulders, but will your insurance cover the cost of this service? Can you save money by doing your own cleaning?
Insurance Coverage for Biohazardous Cleaning
Bioremediation is a method of cleaning hazardous waste by the use of microorganisms and fungi. All insurance policies are different, but the terminology is usually the same. It is important to review your homeowner's insurance policy for references to bioremediation. You can also contact your insurance provider and ask if they close the cleaning after a traumatic event. Bioremediation coverage for events such as floods is common and, in some states, mandatory for homes in flood zones. However, remediation coverage does not always take into account traumatic events such as murder or even natural death.
Will Your Insurance Cover Kill Trauma
Financial Assistant
If your homeowner insurance does not cover cleaning trauma, you have another option to help pay for remediation services. State and federal victim assistance programs help families cope with the unexpected burden of cleaning services. You may also ask your remedial company for discount or financing options. Will Your Insurance Cover Kill Trauma
Can You Clean Yourself?
Prior to the development of bioremediation, families usually have to face self-cleaning after death at home. The process usually involves caustic chemicals and the disposal of furniture, floors, drywall, and personal items. However, this basic cleaning technique can not remove contaminants and harmful microorganisms in the air. These contaminants can be attached to every object in the home, spreading the disease to other family members at home and decomposing into mushrooms. Just a professional cleaning and biohazard cleaning in Canton that completely restores your home and helps you and your family move on.


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By the CNN Wire Staff
NEAR THE ISRAEL-GAZA BORDER (CNN) — Hopes were briefly raised then dashed Tuesday for an imminent calm between Israel and Hamas as diplomats fervently sought a way to stop the deadly violence.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton arrived in the region, where she met for more than two hours with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. She is expected to meet later with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Egyptian President Mohamed Morsy, who is working to broker a cease-fire.
Gaza is run by Hamas, which the United States and other countries consider a terrorist organization.
Clinton spoke to reporters alongside Netanyahu at the prime minister's office in Jerusalem, offering Israel the support of the United States and expressing hope for a lasting peace. She thanked Egypt and especially Morsy for their efforts.
"President Obama asked me to come to Israel with a very clear message. America's commitment to Israel's security is rock solid and unwavering. That is why we believe it is essential to de-escalate the situation in Gaza," she said. "The goal must be a durable outcome that promotes regional stability and advances the security and legitimate aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians alike."
Tuesday marked the seventh day of deadly violence that that has turned life into a nightmare for millions in Israel and Gaza. Rockets rained as the death toll continued to climb.
There was a moment when it looked like the attacks might stop. A senior Hamas official told CNN a "calming down" would be announced at 9 p.m. local time (2 p.m. ET). But that did not happen.
Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri later said that Israel had not agreed to terms that would stop the fighting.
Similarly, Egypt's Morsy said the "travesty of the Israel aggression on Gaza will end in a few hours." But a few hours passed, and Morsy's office told CNN not to expect any announcement Tuesday night.
A "calming down" could halt violence, but it is not the same as an official cease-fire or truce. Israel has said it wants a cease-fire agreement but has not indicated whether one could be imminent.
"Obviously, no country can tolerate a wanton attack on its civilians," said Netanyahu as he stood beside Clinton. "Now, if there is a possibility of achieving a long-term solution to this problem through diplomatic means, we prefer that. But if not, I'm sure you understand that Israel will have to take whatever actions necessary to defend its people."
Netanyahu accused "terrorist enemies" of "doing everything in their power to maximize the number of civilian casualties."
Reports from CNN staff on the ground
According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, 27 people were killed Tuesday, including children, and 137 Palestinians have been killed since the latest hostilities erupted. More than 1,100 people were injured. It's not clear how many of the victims were militants.
Five people have been killed in Israel, according to Israel's Soroka Hospital. More than 70 have been injured, including soldiers, Israeli officials have said.
The death toll in Israel moved from three to four early Tuesday when an 18-year-old soldier was killed in a rocket attack in the town of Eshkol, officials said. It climbed from four to five, according to the hospital, when a 30-year-old Bedouin was killed.
Israel said it was holding off on a ground offensive into Gaza to give diplomatic efforts time. Those efforts include talks with Clinton and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
A source familiar with discussions in Jerusalem told CNN, "One of the Israeli demands is that there should be a period of total calm for 24 hours before committing to any agreement."
Israeli spokesman Mark Regev told CNN, "Diplomacy is still ongoing."
"It's in the hands now of the Israelis," Osama Hamdan, Hamas spokesman in Beirut, told CNN earlier by phone. "… I think the Egyptians are waiting for some support, promised support, from the United States in order to make an end for that. So we expect to have an outcome of this issue today as President Morsy has said." That "expected" outcome didn't arrive.
Speaking early Wednesday, Hamdan said he believes Hamas and Israel are close to a cease-fire agreement.
"I can say that we are close, and we are on the edge. It may happen, and it may not," he said. Later, Hamdan added, "I believe there is a good chance to have a cease-fire, which can fulfill the needs of both sides."
Regev said Israel is not interested in a "time out," allowing Hamas to regroup after Israeli strikes have done damage. "We want a new reality" in which Israelis don't live under rocket fire from Hamas, he said.
To succeed, negotiations have to be done "discreetly," he said.
Hamdan said Hamas' actions have been "a good lesson for the Israeli government. It's not good to attack the Palestinians, expecting that they will not react against the attack."
Asked whether Hamas would accept Israel's right to exist, Hamdan said the Palestinian people would not consider it without an end to occupation.
The onslaught of rockets fired Tuesday into Israel continued to be met by Israeli strikes on sites in Gaza.
Attacks included one aimed at Jerusalem, one that caused casualties in the southern town of Beer Sheva, and one that injured five Israeli soldiers.
Another rocket hit a civilian building in Rishon LeZion, part of metropolitan Tel Aviv, Israel Defense Forces spokeswoman Avital Leibovich said.
Netanyahu, at a news conference with Ban, said Israel was fighting back with "surgical operations against terrorists at a time when our own population is being bombarded by rocket attacks."
"If we hope to make these tactics illegitimate, they should be condemned in the most forceful terms by all responsible members of the international community," he said. "The moment we draw symmetry between the victims of terror and the unintended casualties that result from legitimate military action against the terrorists, the minute that false symmetry is drawn, the terrorists win."
Speaking later at a news conference with Israeli President Shimon Peres, Ban urged diplomacy and said further escalation would put the region at risk.
"The world is concerned, gravely concerned, at the rising loss of human lives. Further escalation would be dangerous and tragic for Palestinians and Israelis and would put the entire region at risk. I am here to appeal to all to halt fire and restore calm immediately," he said. "Further escalation benefits no one. Now is the time for diplomacy."
Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat said Ban was among those who had to take cover when sirens sounded in Jerusalem, warning of an incoming rocket.
Military officials said the rocket landed in an open area of a village.
Other violence Tuesday included 11 Hamas rockets that hit the Israeli city of Beer Sheva, causing casualties. More than 30 rockets were fired into the area, but most were destroyed by Israel's Iron Dome interceptors.
In Tel Aviv, a man with an ax attacked a U.S. Embassy security guard, Israeli police said. The attacker, who also had a knife, was arrested, police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.
The IDF again dropped leaflets across parts of Gaza warning residents to evacuate their homes and go to central Gaza City. The leaflets told them which way to go and what part of the city to stay in once they arrived.
The leaflets are part of Israel's efforts to minimize civilian casualties, Israeli officials say.
As a CNN crew was getting video of families fleeing an area in Gaza, an explosion shook the windows of a school, CNN's Arwa Damon reported. The target was a vehicle around the corner, and the strike killed two people, she said.
Another Israeli airstrike hit a building that houses the local offices of Agence France-Presse in Gaza City. No one from the agency was injured, according to AFP.
Also in Gaza, CNN saw a group of men drag the body of a man through streets from the back of a motorcycle. The men, who carried weapons, yelled in Arabic that he was a traitor and Israeli spy.
Gaza has endured a crippling economic embargo since Hamas won control of the territory from the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority after a landslide 2007 election that was followed by intra-Palestinian clashes.
Many Arab and Muslim nations view Hamas as the victim of Israeli aggression.
Diplomats hope to avoid a repeat of 2008-2009, when at least 1,400 people died when Israeli troops invaded Gaza after a similar spate of rocket attacks.
CNN's Dana Ford, Josh Levs, Arwa Damon, Ben Wedeman, Christiane Amanpour, Holly Yan, Mohamed Fadel Fahmy, Saad Abedine, Sara Sidner, Frederik Pleitgen, Kareem Khadder, Reza Sayah and Talia Kayali contributed to this report.
™ & © 2012 Cable News Network, Inc., a Time Warner Company. All rights reserved.


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The Islamic Republic of Iran is a dictatorship, but not in the mold of Kim Jong-un's North Korea, Bashar al-Assad's Syria, or Alexander Lukashenko's Belarus; rather, it is a dictatorship by veto power. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei maintains an opaque office. While the names of top advisers are public, little is known about the rank-and-file clerical commissars whom Iran watchers estimate number between 600 and 2,000. These "political guides" permeate every bureaucracy and power center inside Iran. For example, Ali-Reza Adyani is the supreme leader's representative to the IRGC Navy and, while running for parliament, Gholamreza Baghbani listed among his credentials his work in the Office of the Supreme Leader as a political guide for the Sistan va Baluchestan province.[1]
How the Supreme Leader Operates
When policy disputes arise among political factions, the commissar's job is to stovepipe information to the supreme leader. This is traditional Persian statecraft: Abu Ali al-Hasan al-Tusi Nizam al-Mulk, an 11th-century vizier and the Persian Machiavelli, wrote, "It is the king's duty . . . to know everything that goes on. . . . In every age in the time of ignorance and of Islam, kings have had postmasters, through whom they have learnt everything that goes on, good and bad. . . . They must be directly responsible to the king and not to anyone else."[2]
When the supreme leader learns about internal debates, he quietly determines if the debate should continue or whether he should warn one side to fold, often by a subtle warning in a sermon. The Friday prayer leaders—whom the supreme leader directly appoints for provinces, cities, and major towns—are deceptively important as barometers of regime direction.[3]
During August 2012 Eid ul-Fitr prayers, for example, Khamenei ended discussion of sincere dialogue with the United States. "We should know that America and Zionism are enemies of the Islamic Ummah [community]. . . . They destroy whatever they can and they cause as much disruption as they can," he declared.4 Temporary Tehran Friday prayer leader Hojjat-ol-Islam Kazem Sedighi sounded the same theme less than a week later.[5]
For American intelligence analysts, Iran's dictatorship by veto poses a problem: there will seldom, if ever, be a smoking gun in signals intelligence. If policymakers consider only intercepted telephone conversation or written orders to be definitive proof, then they will never find proof; the supreme leader is more likely to describe red lines his subordinates cannot cross than to give direct operational orders.
It is arrogant for American policymakers to project the American chain of command onto Iran. Ordinary Iranian bureaucrats and officers enjoy relative autonomy between sometimes amorphous regime red lines. Iranian officials are far more likely than their North Korean and Syrian counterparts to make decisions and, indeed, embrace relative autonomy, a system that works well since the Iranian leadership prioritizes not traditional battlefield confrontation but asymmetric operations.
The Rise of the Revolutionary Guards
The supreme leader is also a master puppeteer. The Zoroastrian notion of duality that permeated the Persian past was not only religious, but also cultural. What Western democracies might see as redundant bureaucracy, Iranian leaders embrace as insurance against treachery. The leader can check any official's rise by bestowing favor upon competing officials.
The Islamic Republic has embraced this philosophy wholeheartedly in both foreign affairs and domestic policy. During Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, Tehran supported both Abdul Aziz Hakim, the late leader of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, and his competitor, firebrand cleric Muqtada al-Sadr. Whenever one would prove too independent, the Iranian leadership would shift resources and assistance to the other, creating incentive for loyalty.
The strategy explains the supreme leader's political longevity. When the president grows too strong, the leader empowers the parliament to check the president's power. If both the president and parliament find solidarity, as they did during Mohammad Khatami's populist presidency, then the supreme leader might bolster the Guardian Council or Expediency Council by imbuing them with greater political responsibility and supervisory functions or even charge security services or vigilante groups like Ansar-e Hezbollah to cut rivals down to size.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's rise to power was also the result of this balancing act. His 2005 victory was less the product of any democratic process than of behind-the-scenes machinations. "Up until five o'clock in the morning . . . on the basis of the votes cast, I was often among the first," former speaker of the parliament and frontrunner Mehdi Karroubi noted after Iranian authorities announced Ahmadinejad victorious in the initial balloting. "However, suddenly from seven o'clock on Saturday morning everything changed," he said. The issue was not a sudden wave of Ahmadinejad ballots, Karroubi speculated, blaming "forces that are like tools in the hands of some complex organizations."[6]
Ahmadinejad was the Islamic Republic's first president to rise to power on military rather than clerical credentials. His victory likely represented a conscious effort by the supreme leader to empower the IRGC to counterbalance reformist clerics who contradicted Khamenei's vision. The 1999 student riots frightened Khamenei, forcing him for the first time to confront the animosity of Iranian youth toward their system of government. By empowering the IRGC, he rolled back the reformist movement. But as Ahmadinejad completes his final year as president, Khamenei's gamble has backfired and the supreme leader's traditional balancing act has gone permanently awry.
Ahmadinejad may be subordinate to Khamenei and, after multiple power struggles, be isolated within the Iranian hierarchy, but he has used the limited power of the presidency to push the IRGC into the driver's seat. Not only are there now more ministers and deputy ministers who are IRGC veterans, but there are also more governors and deputy governors and other functionaries throughout the system. The April 2011 political crisis that erupted when Ahmadinejad tried to fire Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi had more to do with purging the only cleric in an IRGC-dominated cabinet rather than simply attacking a supreme leader favorite. Although many American analysts and journalists examine Iranian decision making and policy formation through the prism of the wire diagrams of the Islamic Republic's formal hierarchy, the informal relationships among IRGC veterans forged in the trenches during the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88) now trump formal structure.
The IRGC's rise also puts the group's revolutionary ideology front and center. As in any dictatorship, the populace may be moderate, apolitical, and even pro-American, but policymakers must focus on those in the regime who actually hold power. Reports about drunken parties in northern Tehran or the pro-Western attitudes of Iranian youth are irrelevant to policymakers who must determine how their Iranian counterparts think and what beliefs motivate their actions.
The Iran-Iraq War shaped today's senior Revolutionary Guardsmen. Much of the animosity between Ahmadinejad and his predecessors involve the IRGC cadres' resentment that clerical politicians like Hojjat al-Islam Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former judiciary chief Mohammad Yazdi grew rich while the Guardsmen suffered in the trenches.
The front line with Iraq was an incubator for IRGC leaders, many of whom have never had formal education outside the IRGC nor exposure to the outside world. Quds Force head Qassem Suleimani, for example, likely has only a fifth-grade education; everything else he learned through the Guards.[7]
With the Iran-Iraq War over, the IRGC transformed the paramilitary Basij-e Mostaz'afin, literally "Mobilization of the Oppressed," into the chief mechanism to indoctrinate youth. The Basij began as a volunteer militia operating in defense of revolutionary principles. The iconic image of Basij members in the organization's early years was of unarmed 15-year-olds with headbands singing Imam Hussein's praises, running across minefields with plastic keys to paradise dangling from their necks. In subsequent years, the regime institutionalized the Basij. Secondary school and university students, teachers, doctors, factory workers, women, craftsmen, and even nomads have their own Basij chapters.
Recruits are as likely to join for the privileges as for ideology. IRGC and Basij members receive higher quotas on subsidized goods like gasoline and often have slots reserved for them in the university and for government jobs. Those who are not true believers, however, are subject to intense indoctrination in the group's clubs, summer camps, and recreation centers.8 Those who rise through the ranks of the IRGC can attend Imam Hossein University, the IRGC's own university, for advanced study. Basijis and Guardsmen can attend Baqiyatollah University to gain medical degrees. Political commissars matriculate at Qom's Martyr Mahallati University, where the IRGC completes its political and religious indoctrination.[9]
It is fashionable in some circles to suggest moral equivalence between Tehran and Washington. When tension rises, journalists too often suggest the trappings of normalcy in Iran means US fear about the Islamic Republic's intentions is misplaced. "Memo to Secretary Clinton: Iran is neither a military dictatorship nor or a police state. Yet. There is no visible military presence at the international airport. . . . There is also no visible military presence in the sprawling city of some 12 million souls and at times it seems an equal number of cars," Iranian American journalist Hooman Majd wrote.[10]
University of Minnesota anthropologist William Beeman wrote a book professing moral equivalence between "The Great Satan" and the "Mad Mullahs."[11] Even some American diplomats accept the moral equivalence arguments.[12] Ordinary Iranians, however, do not hold the levers of power. It is the revolutionary theocratic ideology of those who do that should concern American national security professionals.
Ahmadinejad and the Hidden Imam
Ahmadinejad's Holocaust denial, his threats to eradicate Israel, and his claims to have personal channels to the Mahdi, Shi'ism's messianic figure, drove Iran's religious ideology to the forefront of domestic politics and international news. Upon winning the presidency, Ahmadinejad allocated $17 million to the Jamkaran Mosque, the site from where the Mahdi will reemerge from his centuries-long disappearance from the physical world.[13] Just one month after taking office, Ahmadinejad concluded a speech to the United Nations by beseeching, "O mighty Lord, I pray to you to hasten the emergence of your last repository, the promised one, that perfect and pure human being, the one that will fill this world with justice and peace."[14] Upon his return to Tehran, Ahmadinejad claimed "a halo of light" appeared above his head as he spoke to the assembled world leaders and diplomats.[15] He subsequently claimed that all assembled in the United Nations hall sat transfixed, not even blinking, as he inspired them with the Hidden Imam's words.
The root of concern is not belief in the Mahdi itself—Khatami also spoke of the Hidden Imam during his presidency—but Ahmadinejad's belief that he could hasten the Mahdi's return.[16] He repeatedly alluded to the return of the Hidden Imam in a 2006 letter he sent to President George W. Bush, and he also sponsored conferences calling Mahdism the "defining strategy of the Islamic Republic."[17] Ayatollah Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, Ahmadinejad's theological guide, has argued that it is a Koranic duty for Muslims to wage war against non-Muslims "to prepare the way for the advent of the Mahdi and conquering the world."[18]
Ahmadinejad's strategy may also be cynical. Traditional Shi'ite exegesis suggests clergy will initially deny recognition of the Hidden Imam upon his reemergence: to recognize the Mahdi's return would be to forfeit their privileged position in society. By suggesting that his policies will hasten the Mahdi's return, Ahmadinejad subtly suggests to ordinary Iranians steeped in folk practice that his policies and the opposition to "corrupted" clergy are consistent with "true" religion. In effect, every Ahmadinejad reference to the Hidden Imam's return during a political crisis is an attempt at a "Hail Mary" pass over the heads of the clergy into the end zone. Shi'ism might form the basis for the Islamic Republic's ideology, but who best interprets the Hidden Imam's desire is increasingly the subject of political struggle.
Is the IRGC Cohesive?
For American intelligence, the IRGC remains a black hole. Although it is easy to label Iranian politicians as reformists, pragmatists, or hard-liners, it is not as easy to divide IRGC members into factions. Although the RAND Corporation claimed in a 2009 report to identify divisions within the Guards, its report was more theoretical than practical and was not able to place individual officers in any particular category.[19] Even if most IRGC members were pragmatic, some IRGC commanders surely internalize the ideology and radical religious interpretations espoused by Ahmadinejad.
In September 2007, Mohammad Ali Jafari replaced Yahya Rahim Safavi as head of the IRGC. He immediately enacted a broad restructuring.[20] Arguing that the greatest threats to the revolutionary regime no longer came from Iraq or Afghanistan, he turned the IRGC's focus inward to counter ideological threats to the regime.21 He reorganized the IRGC into provincial units charged with crushing insurrection.[22]
This creates an opportunity for US intelligence to gauge the loyalty of IRGC members: if Jafari assigns native Guardsmen into provincial units, it suggests that the supreme leader believes the IRGC to be loyal enough to carry out the order to fire on friends, families, and neighbors. If, however, Guardsmen cannot serve in their native province, then it suggests that the supreme leader understands that the embrace of regime ideology is not absolute even among his Praetorian Guards. To some extent, the solution would simply be to ask members of the Iranian diaspora to inquire of their family and friends serving in the Iranian armed forces. Finding the answer should be important to crafting US strategy to neutralize the IRGC.
The lack of attention among American policymakers to factionalism within the IRGC is unfortunate. Although American officials place their hope in reformers moderating Tehran, we will see neither meaningful reform nor regime collapse without first fracturing the IRGC. After all, sovereignty in the Islamic Republic comes not from the people but from God through the supreme leader. It matters little to Khamenei what the people think so long as the IRGC remains a buffer against the public will. An almost desperate desire for diplomacy, however, prevents the White House from pursuing strategies to identify and exploit IRGC fissures.
The lack of insight about the degree to which IRGC members internalize regime ideology also undercuts the efficacy of containment. Many analysts and diplomats insist that because the Iranian regime is not suicidal, it would not endanger itself with a nuclear first strike and so could be contained. Such an argument, however, discounts consideration of command, control, and custody of Iran's potential nuclear arsenal.
It is safe to assume that the most loyal and ideologically pure unit of the IRGC would have custody over the nuclear arsenal. To assume that the IRGC's ideological elite operate as Americans would is naïve. Even if they did, regime collapse might create a situation in which deterrence would break down: if the Iranian people rise up and make regime collapse inevitable, those controlling Iran's nuclear weapons might launch them against ideological enemies because the regime they are charged to defend is doomed. Iranian leaders calculate that American politicians would never gratuitously kill several million Iranians in retaliation against a regime that has already fallen. After all, when in April 2008, then-senator Hillary Clinton promised that should Iran "foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them," then-senator Barack Obama castigated Clinton for "saber-rattling."[23]
There may be no way to undo the IRGC's stranglehold on Iranian policymaking. Ahmadinejad's machinations have enabled the IRGC to gain financial autonomy. Gharargah Sazandegi-ye Khatam al-Anbia (Construction Base of the Seal of the Prophets), often referred to as GHORB or simply Khatam al-Anbia, is the IRGC's economic wing. It is a massive enterprise, like a cross between the Army Corps of Engineers, Bechtel, and Halliburton, but with even greater influence not only within Iran's defense industries, but also throughout its civilian economy.
Since 2007, Khatam al-Anbia has reaped billions of dollars in no-bid contracts. In March 2010, for example, the Oil Ministry awarded Khatam al-Anbia an $850 million pipeline project.24 In April 2010, the group won a $7 billion no-bid contract to develop part of the South Pars oil and gas field.25 In June 2010, a consortium of IRGC companies won a $5 billion no-bid contract to develop yet another portion of the South Pars field and, in February 2011, the Iranian government awarded Khatam al-Anbia two contracts worth a total of $2.6 billion to build pipelines.26 In less than a year, therefore, the IRGC's economic wing more than doubled the annual Iranian military budget.27 Add to that smuggling income of perhaps $12 billion per year,28 and the IRGC becomes financially independent of the government.
Even if a diplomatic grand bargain led the Iranian government to cancel the IRGC's official budget of $5 billion annually, the breadth of Khatam al-Anbia and smuggling activities would mean, effectively, that the IRGC would face a budget cut less severe than that the Obama administration now contemplates for the Pentagon.
"Export of Revolution"
"Export of revolution" is the Islamic Republic's raison d'être. The concept is enshrined in the Islamic Republic's constitution. Article 3 declares the goals of the regime to be both "the expansion and strengthening of Islamic brotherhood and public cooperation among all the people" and "unsparing support to the oppressed of the world," while Article 154 calls for support of the just struggles of the oppressed against the arrogant in every corner of the globe."[29] On its surface, support for the repressed may sound like a noble goal, but in practice, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, defined the repressed as any living under a system other than Iran's. "The United States can't do a damned thing; we will export our revolution to the world," became Khomeini's mantra and, subsequently, an IRGC slogan.[30]
On July 25, 1981, Payam-e Enghelab defined "the principle of jihad" as one of the two main tasks of the Guards, the other being defending the supreme leader's government.[31] In the Islamic Republic's early years, it sought to export revolution to Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Pakistan, Iraq, and others. With the exception of Lebanon, where Hezbollah took root, all Khomeini's revolutionaries achieved was bad blood between Tehran and regional capitals.
The one commonality among regime officials—whether reformers or hard-liners—is the acceptance of revolutionary export as a pillar of policy. Iranian leadership accepts only an interpretation of revolutionary export rooted in violence, not soft power. In a May 3, 2008, speech, Khatami suggested that Iranian officials redefine the concept in terms of soft power. "What did the Imam [Khomeini] want, and what was his purpose of exporting the revolution? Did he wish us to export revolution by means of gunpowder or groups sabotaging other countries?" Khatami asked, before suggesting Khomeini "meant to establish a role model here, which means people should see that in this society, the economy, science, and dignity of man are respected."[32]
Iranian authorities were furious. Not only had Khatami undercut Iran's plausible deniability as he acknowledged that Iranian terror support enjoyed state sanction, but he also sought to dilute an important pillar of the revolution. Seventy-seven members of parliament responded by demanding the Intelligence Ministry investigate Khatami for his comments.33 As the controversy over Khatami's remarks faded, Ayatollah Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, the powerful judiciary chief and a man who often serves as Khamenei's stand-in for foreign visits, enunciated Tehran's continued commitment to exporting the revolution. Speaking to armed forces, he declared the IRGC to be "the hope of Islamic national and Islamic liberation movements."[34] The Iranian government has even been so bold as to include a line item for "resistance" in its budget.[35]
Iran's Strategic Objectives
Iranian strategic objectives are shaped by a combination of Khomeini's vision, Iranian nationalism, and pragmatism. Khomeini made antipathy toward the United States and Israel a cornerstone of his philosophy. Grievances toward America pepper his speeches from his days in exile in Najaf through his final sermons in Tehran.[36] As the founding father of the Islamic Republic, Khomeini is untouchable. Today, all political debates—be they about the justification for the role of the IRGC in domestic politics or the meaning of export of revolution—are rooted in Khomeini's intent. If Iranians used bumper stickers, Iranian leaders would have "WWKD?" [What Would Khomeini Do?] on their Paykans, Saipas, and Peugeots. From his early years, Khomeini warned against any compromise with Israel, whose very existence he considered anathema, and had no appetite for normalization with the United States.
It would be difficult, if not impossible, for any official to challenge, let alone reverse, official antipathy toward the United States. Former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani learned this lesson in April 2012 after he suggested that no real difference existed between Tehran developing relations with Beijing and Moscow and normalizing ties with Washington.[37] Speaking at Mashhad Friday prayers, Ayatollah Ahmad Alamolhoda declared, "Our foreign policy is based on the principle of fighting with the Arrogance," adding, "Undoubtedly, negotiations with America have never been and will never be in our interests."[38] Ahmad Khatami, in his capacity as temporary Friday prayer leader, likewise castigated Rafsanjani as "naïve" and "timid."[39]
Nationalism also colors Tehran's attitude. Although ordinary Iranians may no longer believe in the religious philosophy that drove the Islamic Revolution, most are nationalistic. Iran—or Persia, as it was called before 1935—is one of the few states in Asia that has a near-contiguous history of nationhood going back millennia. Iranian nationalism predates the ethnic nationalism that forms the basis of many states' identities. Ethnic minorities in Iran are generally neither aggrieved nor separatists. The exceptions are Sunni Kurds and Baluch, who face the double whammy of being both ethnic and sectarian minorities, treated as second-class citizens. Khamenei himself is not an ethnic Persian, but an Azeri. Likewise, Khatami is half Azeri, and Shahroudi is an Arab.
Many Iranians believe their country is only half the size today that it should be. In the 16th century, the Portuguese wrested control of Persian Gulf islands—including Bahrain—from Iran. Although Tehran resisted formal European colonization during the 19th and 20th centuries, it nevertheless lost territory. In 1828, Iran lost much of what today are Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia to Russia. The Anglo-Persian War of 1856–57 led it to forfeit western Afghanistan. In the early 1870s, British telegraph workers awarded most of Baluchistan to what is now Pakistan.
Iranian leaders do not seek to recapture lost territory. But they do consider their immediate environs—from Iraq and the Persian Gulf through Afghanistan and much of Central Asia—to be a "near abroad" in which they deserve predominant political and cultural influence.
Contemporary Iranian nationalism is also interwoven with the belief that Iran should protect both ethnic Persians and Shi'ites. Genetics may dominate the Western understanding of ethnicity but, in the Middle East, ethnicity is defined by native language. Because Tajik and Dari are dialects of Persian, Iranian leaders extend their big-brother attitude to the border of China, often to the frustration of local Tajiks and Afghans.[40]
The regime uses propagation and defense of Shi'ism not only to justify Iranian interference in majority Shi'ite states like Azerbaijan, Iraq, and Bahrain, but also in countries like Venezuela, where hard-line press outlets trumpet bizarre stories about whole Venezuelan tribes converting to Shi'ite Islam.[41]
Dominating the Shi'ite world is a matter not only of ideological ambition, but also of revolutionary survival. Traditionally, Shi'ites believe that the return of the Hidden Imam will herald the creation of a perfect, incorrupt Islamic government. Until the Mahdi returns, then, all governments are by definition unjust, corrupt, and un-Islamic. Khomeini revived and expanded the concept of velayat-e faqih (guardianship of the jurist) to justify clerical rule, arguing that the supreme leader could be the Nayeb-e Imam (deputy of the Messiah).[42] Khomeini explained, "fuqaha (Jurists) are the proof of the Imam (upon whom be peace) to the people. All the affairs of the Muslims have been entrusted to them."[43] Because most ayatollahs do not accept this interpretation, Shi'ism is not only the Islamic Republic's raison d'être, but also its Achilles' heel.
After all, Shi'ism, like Roman Catholicism, is hierarchical. Unlike Catholicism, however, no consensus exists regarding who is the ultimate leader. Shi'ites choose their marja' at-taqlid (source of emulation) from among the leading living ayatollahs. This person, in effect, becomes their personal pope, their supreme source of religious guidance.
There are certain conditions. Individuals must follow only one ayatollah, rather than take an a la carte approach, and he must be living. In exchange for such guidance, laymen pay khums, a religious tax to their marja. When ordinary Shi'ites cast their allegiance with other ayatollahs, this creates a legitimacy crisis for Iran's supreme leader. In 1994, when Grand Ayatollah Mohammad Ali Araki died, the Islamic Republic sought to impose Khamenei as the undisputed marja for all Shi'ites.[44] It did not work: Grand Ayatollahs Mohammad al-Husayni al-Shirazi, Mohammad Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr, and Ali Sistani had far greater clout, and in the face of grassroots resistance, Khamenei withdrew his claim.[45]
As Sistani ages, the pattern is repeating. While Khamenei is too wise to float his own name again, the Islamic Republic has been quietly pushing Shahroudi as a successor to Sistani.[46] Clerics opposed to velayat-e faqih are preparing for the Iranian push. Although Shi'ites may only follow living marja, the agents for the late Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah have continued to accept khums two and a half years after Fadlallah's death. Iraqi religious sources explain the continued activities of Fadlallah's agents by suggesting that clerics understand that Fadlallah's office is using his name to raise funds for the Iraqi-born Ayatollah Hussein Ismael al-Sadr; al-Sadr, they say, does not want to insult Sistani by raising money directly while his mentor is still alive.
The stakes are huge. When Khamenei lost to Shirazi, Sadr, and Sistani in 1994, he licked his wounds. He could live with spiritual rivals so long as they remained trapped under the repressive hand of Saddam Hussein. Saddam's fall empowered Khamenei's clerical rivals. If the Islamic Republic manages to unify the marja under its philosophy, it will consolidate its philosophy among all Shi'ites. If, however, Khamenei fails, the blow to the Islamic Republic's legitimacy could be crippling.
The Hezbollah Strategy
Iranian officials and their fellow travelers claim often that Iran has not invaded another country for almost two centuries. "Iran has not invaded any country in the last two centuries and is the only country victim of weapons of mass destruction since the World War II," wrote Hossein Mousavian, Iran's former nuclear spokesman.[47] Likewise, University of Michigan professor Juan Cole declared, "Modern Iran has not aggressively invaded another country for two centuries."[48] Such claims are disingenuous. Not only did the Iranian military seize islands belonging to the Emirate of Sharjah in 1971, but in the years after the Islamic Revolution, Iranian aggression has occurred both frequently and by proxy.
Hezbollah is the marquee example. The Islamic Republic founded Hezbollah for pragmatic reasons: Israel had invaded Lebanon. Ali Muhtashimi, Iran's ambassador in Syria between 1982 and 1985, sought IRGC units to fight the Israelis in Lebanon. Khomeini balked. "The Imam cooled me down and said that the forces we send to Syria and Lebanon would need huge logistical support," Muhtashimi recalled. He added, "Reinforcement and support would need to go through Turkey and Iraq. We are in a fierce war with Iraq. As for Turkey, it is a NATO member and an ally of the United States. The only remaining way is to train the Shia men there, and so Hezbollah was born."[49] Muhtashimi described training 100,000 Hezbollah fighters in batches of 300. The Iranian embassy in Damascus was the nerve center for operations.[50]
The proxy relationship proved beneficial for Tehran. While the IRGC has continued to supply Hezbollah through Damascus International Airport, Hezbollah has also been able to develop its own revenue stream through drug cultivation, taxation, and its own business enterprises. Hezbollah maintains its fealty to the supreme leader,[51] and the Iranian leadership benefits from debates regarding Hezbollah's autonomy. Utilizing Hezbollah enables Tehran to maintain plausible deniability.
Whether because of ideological sympathy or pragmatic necessity, Hezbollah often acts as the front line for the Quds Force and the IRGC. Investigations of the 1992 Mykonos Café assassinations of Kurdish dissidents in Berlin and the bombing of the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1994 show Hezbollah worked hand in hand with the Quds Force and the Islamic Republic both by conducting surveillance and operationally.[52]
Throughout the Middle East, Hezbollah helps the IRGC bridge the ethnic divide between Persians and Arabs. Hezbollah agents operated openly in southern Iraq in support of Iranian goals and have provided Iran plausible deniability about Quds Force involvement in Syria during the anti-Assad uprising. Likewise, Bahraini authorities denied some medical doctors entry into the country, accusing them of being Hezbollah operatives working on behalf of Iran.[53]
In pursuit of greater ideological goals, the Iranian leadership is also willing to strike pragmatic alliances. It has, for example, sided with Christian Armenia against Shi'ite Azerbaijan in the territorial and military dispute between its two Caucasian neighbors. It has turned its back on Chechen Islamists to cultivate far more lucrative relations with Russia.
Anti-Americanism can be the tie that binds. Even though Iran and the Taliban almost went to war in 1999, the IRGC has, since the fall of the Taliban regime, assisted the Taliban insurgency against American forces in Afghanistan. This does not mean that Tehran wants a Taliban resurgence or victory. Rather, its goals are pragmatic. "It is better for Iran if America is entangled in Afghanistan with the Taliban," a political analyst for the hard-line daily Hamshahri explained.[54] The International Security Assistance Force has intercepted Iranian weapons shipments to the Taliban, and the Afghan National Army has captured Taliban commanders in possession of Iranian bank books.[55] Afghan authorities have also accused Iran of training both Taliban fighters and suicide bombers.[56]
Iranian support for al Qaeda follows the similar logic that an enemy's enemy can be, if not a friend, then a partner for a common goal. The 9/11 Commission found repeated interaction between Iranian officials and al Qaeda dating back to the early 1990s and that Iran facilitated the hijackers' transit to and from their Afghan training camps.[57] In subsequent years, Iranian authorities have provided safe haven for senior al Qaeda officials, sometimes in IRGC facilities.[58] On July 30, 2012, US District Court Judge Frank Maas assigned civil blame to the Islamic Republic for its cooperation with Al Qaeda prior to 9/11 and ordered it pay damages.[59]
Despite the emphasis on hard power incumbent in exporting revolutions, the Iranian regime is agile with soft power. Tehran engages in pocketbook diplomacy, utilizing its oil wealth to dispense aid to countries whose votes it needs on bodies such as the United Nations Security Council and International Atomic Energy Agency. Hence, the Islamic Republic has at various times cultivated aid relationships with South Africa, Nigeria, and the Ivory Coast but shifted its focus elsewhere once those nations fell off international bodies.[60]
Iran's reliance on checkbook diplomacy has repercussions for US security. If officials in Tehran require high oil prices both to achieve diplomatic goals and to keep their inefficient economy afloat, then precipitating crises may become an economic survival tactic. Threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz can increase the price of oil by several dollars per barrel. The IRGC has positioned itself central to Iran's oil industry in terms of not only development, but also control. Ahmadinejad appointed Rostam Ghasemi to be oil minister in August 2011. Ghasemi joined the IRGC in 1981 and rose through the ranks to become head of Khatam al-Anbia.
Education is also an important component of Iranian soft power. In Kabul, Ayatollah Asif Mohseni, a figure beholden to Tehran because his religious credentials are not recognized in Najaf, created Khatam al-Anbia University. Its professors are trained in Iran, and its curriculum and library derive almost exclusively from the country. In 2010, the budget for that single Iranian-backed university was greater than the Afghan government's entire higher education budget.
Revolutionary authorities also utilize charities and media in order to expand their influence. The combination between hard and soft power coalesces into a "Hezbollah Model" in which the IRGC works to weaken its target's government by creating a state within a state. As in Lebanon, it seeks to entrap through fear those citizens whom it cannot entice with patronage.
Of myriad Iranian charities, the Imam Khomeini Relief Committee (IKRC) is the regime's chief overseas aid organization. With assets supplied by the supreme leader, the committee sponsors programs similar to those conducted by Western nongovernmental organizations for orphans, the disabled, and the elderly. It also provides food aid, blankets, and fuel; sponsors computer classes and medical clinics; and offers interest-free loans.[61] It spreads influence in a way few Western organizations could, sponsoring mass weddings for those for whom the price of weddings would otherwise put marriage out of reach, forever indebting them to their Iranian benefactors.[62]
While IKRC's activities might look benign, its track record is more sinister. In 1997, its office provided cover for surveillance on the US Embassy in Tajikistan.[63] In 2010, the US Treasury Department designated the IKRC branch in Lebanon to be a terrorist entity because of its aid and assistance to Hezbollah.[64] With both the IRGC and IKRC funded from the same trough, IKRC offices in Afghanistan, Azerbaijan, Bosnia, and the Comoros Islands likely provide cover for IRGC operations. The same holds true for other charities. In 2009, the FBI seized the assets in New York City of the Alavi Foundation, an Iranian charity funneling money and providing other services to the Islamic Republic.[65]
While US policymakers downplay information operations, media is central to the Iranian strategy. Bahraini Shi'ites listen almost exclusively to Iranian radio and watch Iranian satellite channels. Iranian authorities set up Al-Alam television to broadcast into Iraq months before the United States unveiled its Iraqi service.[66] Iraqi Kurdish students related how Al-Alam distributed phones and video cameras to Kurdish youth promising to pay them for footage that Al-Alam could use; seldom was there a bombing, protest, or an incident embarrassing to American forces that Al-Alam did not cover. The Iranian-backed Ahlulbayt television and radio saturates southern Iraq with religious programming.
The Islamic Republic employs the same strategy in Afghanistan. Upon the Taliban's fall, Quds Force commander Hassan Kazemi-Qomi began to expand Iranian influence in Western Afghanistan by establishing radio and television stations.[67] The Kabul-based Tamadon television broadcasts an Iranian perspective nationwide.
Assessing Iranian Actions and the American Response
The Islamic Republic is not a status quo power. Neither diplomatic agreements nor traditional containment will end the threat posed by Iran. For Tehran, the ideology of the regime is not negotiable. So long as it remains in existence, the Islamic Republic will continue to act on its ideological prerogatives to export revolution, dominate areas it considers its "near abroad," and counter its enemies, first and foremost Israel and the United States.
Iranian officials often quip that they play chess while Americans play checkers. Although the US political calendar often dominates Washington's planning, the Iranian leadership faces no such constraints. The IRGC and Quds Force have global reach and will confront the United States wherever they can, so long as they can maintain plausible deniability. To interpret Iranian behavior through a lens of Iranian grievance would be a critical mistake because it downplays the ideology that motivates the regime's decision makers.
Having experienced the deprivations of war in their youth, the new generation of Iranian leadership calculates its members can weather any storm. The consolidation of Iranian influence in Iraq on the US withdrawal more than offsets the strategic blow a loss of Syria would entail. Although few other states in the region sympathize with Iran, the perception of American weakness will lead regional states to more broadly accommodate the Islamic Republic and could further embolden it to act with renewed vigor.
Wars in the Middle East are caused not by oil or water but by overconfidence. In 1988, an Iranian mine damaged a US guided missile cruiser. In retaliation, President Ronald Reagan ordered Operation Praying Mantis to destroy Iranian oil terminals. The US Navy decimated its Iranian challengers in the ensuing battle, the largest US naval surface engagement since World War II. The red line Reagan established created a tacit understanding that governed US-Iranian relations for another 15 years.
As the Iranian leadership has concluded that it could—literally—get away with murder in Iraq and Afghanistan, that American red lines were ephemeral, and that the United States was not prepared to stop its nuclear program, Tehran has grown bolder. Iranian diplomats might talk, but the powers that be will not abide by any deal. The IRGC and its proxies will continue to test American red lines until the United States forcibly pushes back.
1. "Masoulan-e 'Aghidati-Siyasi-ye Sepah Ta'kid Kardand: Baznegari Dar Nezam-e Amouzeshi-'Aghidati Ba Rouy-Kard-e Ma'naviat-Afzayi" [Ideological-Political Heads of the Guards Stress upon Reorientation of the Educational System of the Guards toward Added Spirituality], Sobh-e Sadegh (Tehran), April 28, 2008; "Mokhtasari az zendaginameh Sardar Gholamreza Baghbani" [A Brief Biography of Commander Gholamreza Baghbani], February 25, 2012, http://majles-9-zahedan.blogfa.com.
2. Nizam al-Mulk,The Book of Government or Rules for Kings, trans. Hubert Darke (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), 64.
3. Arash Sigarchi, "The Battle for Cyberspace: Blogging and Dissidence in the Middle East," American Enterprise Institute conference, Washington, DC, February 4, 2008.
4. "Supreme Leader's Sermons during Eid ul-Fitr Prayers," Khamenei.ir (website of Supreme Leader Khamenei), August 19, 2012.
5. "Friday Prayer Leader Warns About Enemies' Decisive Plots," Islamic Republic News Agency, August 24, 2012.
6. "E'teraz-i shadid-i Karrubi" [Karrubi's Strong Protest] E'temad (Tehran), June 19, 2005.
7. Ali Alfoneh, "Brigadier General Qassem Suleimani: A Biography," AEI Middle East Outlook (January 2011), www.aei.org/outlook/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/middle-east-and-north-africa/brigadier-general-qassem-suleimani-a-biography/.
8. "Avqat-e qaraghat-e kodakan dar paigah-haye Basij" [Leisure-Time Activities in Basij Centers], MehrNews.com (Tehran), August 2, 2012.
9. Ali Alfoneh, "Indoctrination of the Revolutionary Guards," AEI Middle East Outlook (February 2009), www.aei.org/outlook/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/middle-east-and-north-africa/indoctrination-of-the-revolutionary-guards/.
10. "Hooman Majd, "Postcard from Tehran," Foreign Policy, May 6, 2010, www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/06/postcard_from_tehran. See also, Alan Taylor, "A View Inside Iran," The Atlantic, January 6, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2012/01/a-view-inside-iran/100219/.
11. See, for example, William Beeman, The Great Satan vs. The Mad Mullahs: How the United States and Iran Demonize Each Other (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
12. John W. Limbert, Negotiating with the Islamic Republic of Iran (US Institute of Peace, Special Report 199, January 2008), www.usip.org/files/resources/sr199.pdf.
13. Said Amir Arjomand, After Khomeini: Iran under His Successors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 156.
14. "Address by H.E. Dr. Mahmood Ahmadinejad, President of the Islamic Republic of Iran before the Sixtieth Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York" (speech, September 17, 2005), www.un.org/webcast/ga/60/statements/iran050917eng.pdf.
15. "A'lami responds to Ahmadinejad's remarks at a meeting with Ayatollah Javadi-Amoli," Aftab-e Yazd (Tehran), November 29, 2005, as translated.
16. Sharif News (Tehran), October 30, 2005, as quoted in Mohebat Ahdiyyih, "Ahmadinejad and the Mahdi," Middle East Quarterly, 15, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 27–36.
17. "Ahmadinezhad Letter and Return of Hidden Imam," Open Source Center Analysis, May 18, 2006; Ahdiyyih, "Ahmadinejad and the Mahdi."
18. Ahdiyyih, "Ahmadinejad and the Mahdi."
19. Brian Nichiporuk et al., The Rise of the Pasdaran (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2009).
20. Ali Alfoneh, "What Do Structural Changes in the Revolutionary Guards Mean?" AEI Middle East Outlook (September 2008), www.aei.org/outlook/foreign-and-defense-policy /regional/middle-east-and-north-africa/what-do-structural-changes-in-the-revolutionary-guards-mean/.
21. "Sardar Jafari: Ma'mouriat-e asli-ye Sepah moghabeleh ba tahdid-ha-ye dakheli ast" [Commander Jafari: The Main Mission of the Guards Is to Counter Internal Threats], Hamshahri, September 29, 2007; Mohsen Sazegara (founder of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), "Iran in Three Dimensions" (speech, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC, May 19, 2008).
22. "Farmandeh-ye nirou-ye zamini-ye Sepah: Tarh-e moza'ik-ha-ye defa'I sor'at-e 'amal-e Sepah va Basij ra bala mibarad" [IRGC Ground Forces Chief: Realization of the Mosaic Defensive Doctrine Increases Operational Speed of the Guards and the Basij], Mardomsalari (Tehran), July 27, 2008.
23. Jake Tapper, "Clinton, Obama Make Final Pennsylvania Push," ABC Good Morning America, April 22, 2008, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/Vote2008/story?id=4701724&page=1.
24. "Vagozari-ye 850 Melyoun Dolar Prozhehpye Jadid-e Nafti Be Khatam al-Anbia" [$850 Million New Oil Project Given to Khatam al-Anbia], Abrar (Tehran), March 16, 2010.
25. "Gharargah-e Khatam al-Anbia Jaygozin-e Torkiyeh Dar 3 Faz-e Pars-e Jonoubi Mishavad" [Khatam al-Anbia Base to Replace Turkey in Three Phases of the South Pars], Abrar (Tehran), April 19, 2010.
26. "Jaygozinan-e Dakheli-ye Shell va Repsol Dar Pars-e Jonoubi" [Domestic Replacements for Shell and Repsol in South Pars], Pol (Tehran), June 5, 2010, "Vagazari bidun nashrifat 2 pirouzeh-i nafti beh qirargah Khatam al-Anbia" [No-Bid Contracts for Two Oil Projects Awarded to Khatam al-Anbia], Mehr (Tehran), February 26, 2011.
27. Budget estimate in "Iran Plans 127 Percent Defense Budget Increase," Defense News, February 2, 2012.
28. Frederic Wehrey et al. The Rise of the Pasdaran (Santa Monica: RAND, 2009), 38.
29. The Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Article 3 (www.iranonline.com/iran/iran-info/government/constitution-1.html) and Article 154 (www.iranonline.com/iran/iran-info/government/constitution-10.html).
30. "Tars-e Amrika az Ahiya-e Islami" [The US Fear of the Islamic Revival], trans. Open Source Center, Khorasan (Mashhad), January 25, 1996; "Tandar bidun Baran" [Thunder without Rain], Javan (Tehran), August 18, 2005.
31. Quoted in Ali Alfoneh, "The Revolutionary Guards' Role in Iranian Politics," Middle East Quarterly, 15, no. 4 (Fall 2008): 3–14.
32. "Khatami: Dar Zamineh-e tahrif andisheh-ha-ye hazirat-e Imam 'alam khatar mikonam" [Khatami: I Find Danger in the Distortion of His Excellence the Imam's Thoughts], Tehran Emrooz, May 3, 2008.
33. "Jamayeh-i Avari Imza 'Alebeh Khatami" [Gathering Signatures against Khatami], E'temad (Tehran), May 7, 2008.
34. "Iran's Forces Are Models of Resistance," Press TV (Tehran), May 22, 2008.
35. Flatow v. Islamic Republic of Iran, 999 F. Supp. 1 (District Court of the District of Columbia, 1998).
36. See, for example, Imam Khomeini, Islam and Revolution, trans. Hamid Algar (London: KPI, 1981).
37. "Hashemi va tasmimesh bara-ye mazakereh ba Amrika" [Hashemi and His Decision to Talk with America], Fararu.com (Tehran), April 2, 2012.
38. "Highlights: Iran Provincial Friday Sermons 6 Apr 12—Part 1," Open Source Center, April 6, 2012.
39. Hojjat al-Islam Sayiid Ahmad Khatami, "Khutbah-ye Nimaz Jameah," (Friday Prayer Sermons), Nasim Online (Tehran), April 6, 2012.
40. "Aval Hamsaye-ha gharamit bipurdazand" [First, the Neighbors Should Pay Compensation], Hasht-e Sobh (Kabul), March 28, 2012.
41. "Garayesh-e dasteh jama'eh dar barkhi qaba'il-e amrika-ye latin" [Mass Conversion of Some Tribes in Latin America], Raja News (Tehran), November 3, 2007.
42. Martin Kramer, Shi'ism, Resistance, and Revolution (Boulder: Westview Press, 1987), 128.
43. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, "Hukumat-e Islami" [Islamic Governance], trans. Hamid Algar, pamphlet, 1971.
44. "Iran Names Its Spiritual Leader as Top Shiite, Altering Process," New York Times, December 7, 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/12/07/world/iran-names-its-spiritual-leader-as-top-shiite-altering-process.html.
45. "Iranian Rejects Call to Guide Shiite Muslims," New York Times, December 15, 1994, www.nytimes.com/1994/12/15/world/world-news-briefs-iranian-rejects-call-to-guide-shiite-muslims.html.
46. Tim Arango, "Iran Promotes Its Candidate for Next Shiite Leader," New York Times, May 11, 2012, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/12/world/middleeast/iran-promotes-its-candidate-for-next-shiite-leader.html.
47. Hossein Mousavian, "The Nuclear Talks with Iran: A Way toward Grand Bargain or Regime Change," Chautauquan Daily, August 4, 2011, http://chqdaily.com/2011/08/04/the-nuclear-talks-with-iran-a-way-toward-grand-bargain-or-regime-change/.
48. Juan Cole, "Bush Sets Preconditions for Iran Syria" [sic], Informed Comment [blog], December 8, 2006, www.juancole.com/2006/12/bush-sets-preconditions-for-iran-syria.html.
49. Ali Muhtashimi interview with Shargh (Tehran), August 3, 2008.
50. Manal Lufti, "Akhtari: Hizballah and HAMAS Legitimate Sons of Islamic Revolution, Operational Father of Hizballah and Engineer of Special Relations between Syria and Iran Reveals to Al-Sharq al-Awsat in Rare Dialogue the Inside Story of the Establishment of the Party and the Compound Relations with Damascus," trans. Open Source Center, Ash-Sharq al-Awsat (London), May 14, 2008.
51. Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, "Khamenei and Hezbollah: Leading in Spirit," Al-Akhbar, August 8, 2012, http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/10894.
52. Iran Human Rights Documentation Center, Murder at Mykonos: Anatomy of a Political Assassination (New Haven, CT: Author, 2007), 2–20; "Acusan a Irán de haber planeado elatentado contra la AMIA" [Iran Accused of Masterminding the Bombing of AMIA], La Nacion (Buenos Aires), October 25, 2006.
53. Author's interviews with Bahraini officials, Manama, February 2012; David Cohen, "Briefing on the Designation of Hezbollah for Supporting the Syrian Regime," US Department of State, August 10, 2012.
54. Kim Murphy, "Iran Is Keeping Its Options Open in Afghanistan," Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2008, www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2007/08/15/iran_is_keeping_its_options_open_in_afghanistan/.
55. Denis Blair, "Annual Threat Assessment of the Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence," presented to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, February 12, 2009, http://intelligence.senate.gov/090212/blair.pdf; "Farmandeh Taliban dar Iran Hesaab-e Banki Darad" [Taliban Commander Has Bank Account in Iran], Hasht-e Sobh (Kabul), January 8, 2011.
56. "Gulab Mangal, Vali Helmand: Iran va Pakistan Muhalafan-e Maslah ra Hamayat Mikonad," [Helmand Governor Gulab Mangal: Iran and Pakistan Support Armed Opposition," Hasht-e Sobh, February 13, 2011.
57. National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report (Washington, DC: Author, July 22, 2004), 60–61, 169, 240–41.
58. Sharon Chadha, "What Is al-Qaeda Management Doing in Iran?" Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty Newsline (Prague), December 2, 2004; "Nearly 400 al-Qaeda Members and Other Terror Suspects in Iran," Agence France Presse, July 15, 2004.
59. United States District Court, Southern District of New York, In Re: Terrorist Attacks on September 11, 2001, Regarding Havlish v. bin Laden, 03 Civ. 9848 (GBD) (FM), July 30, 2012.
60. See, for example, "Senegalese President: Nuclear Technology Is Iran's Legitimate Right," Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), November 25, 2007; "SA Commends Iran's Stance on Nuclear Program," IRNA, September 14, 2007; and "Ivory Coast Blasts West for Opposing N. Iran," Fars News Agency, April 24, 2007.
61. See, for example, Imam Khomeini Relief Foundation, "Draft of the Final Declaration of the 1st Joint Conference of Poverty Elimination and Sustainable Development," January 16–17, 2007, www.emdad.ir/en/conf.asp. See also Ali Alfoneh and Ahmad Majidyar, "Iranian Influence in Afghanistan: Imam Khomeini Relief Committee," AEI Middle East Outlook (July 2010), www.aei.org/outlook/foreign-and-defense-policy/regional/india-pakistan-afghanistan/iranian-influence-in-afghanistan-outlook-1/.
62. "Jashan-e Komiteh-e Emdad Baraye zawjha-ye Afghan" [Relief Committee Celebration for Afghan Husbands], Fararu.com, May 24, 2012.
63. Author was an intern based at the US Embassy in Tajikistan at the time.
64. "Fact Sheet: US Treasury Department Targets Iran's Support for Terrorism Treasury Announces New Sanctions against Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force Leadership," US Treasury Department, August 3, 2010.
65. Benjamin Weiser, "US Moves to Seize Properties Tied to Iran," New York Times, November 12, 2009, www.nytimes.com/2009/11/13/nyregion/13seize.html; "Former President of Alavi Foundation Pleads Guilty in Manhattan Federal Court to Obstruction of Justice," US Attorney's Office, Southern District of New York, December 30, 2009, www.justice.gov/usao/nys/pressreleases/December09/jahedifarshidpleapr.pdf.
66. "Iran Launches Arabic-Language Satellite News Channel," Agence France-Presse, February 24, 2003.
67. "Iranian Envoy Lists Iranian Infrastructure Projects in Afghan Herat Province," IRNA, October 27, 2003.


text:
Construction Garbarino
Write a review
Sharing your experience helps your fellow new construction home buyers and renters. Thanks!
Tips for writing reviews
- Use correct grammar and spelling
- Talk about your customer experience
- Describe the build quality
- Discuss the location and surrounding amenities
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text:
In cryptography, a secret sharing scheme is a method for distributing a secret amongst a group of participants, each of which is allocated a share of the secret. The secret can only be reconstructed when the shares are combined together; individual shares are of no use on their own.
More formally, in a secret sharing scheme there is one dealer and n players. The dealer gives a secret to the players, but only when specific conditions are fulfilled. The dealer accomplishes this by giving each player a share in such a way that any group of t (for threshold) or more players can together reconstruct the secret but no group of less than t players can. Such a system is called a (t,n)-threshold scheme.
A popular technique to implement threshold schemes uses polynomial interpolation ("Lagrange interpolation"). This method was invented by Adi Shamir in 1979. You can play around with such a scheme on the demo page.
Note that Shamir's scheme is provable secure, that means: in a (t,n) scheme one can prove that it makes no difference whether an attacker has t-1 valid shares at his disposal or none at all; as long as he has less than t shares, there is no better option than guessing to find out the secret.
Good passwords are hard to memorize. A clever user could use a secret sharing scheme to generate a set of shares for a given password and store one share in his address book, one in his bank deposit safe, leave one share with a friend, etc. If one day he forgets his password, he can reconstruct it easily. Of course, writing passwords directly into the address book would pose a security risk, as it could be stolen by an "enemy". If a secret sharing scheme is used, the attacker has to steal many shares from different places.
A typical application of this scenario is the secure implementation of an encrypted backup system. Assuming that data recoveries are needed rarely, backup data can be public key encrypted -- this can be done automatically and without user interaction -- while the private recovery key is protected via secret sharing.
ssss is an implementation of Shamir's secret sharing scheme for UNIX/linux machines. It is free software, the code is licensed under the GNU GPL v2. ssss does both: the generation of shares for a known secret and the reconstruction of a secret using user provided shares. The software was written in 2006 by B. Poettering, it links against the GNU libgmp multiprecision library (version 4.1.4 works well) and requires the /dev/random entropy source.
(SHA1: 3f8f5046c2c5c3a2cf1a93f0a9446681852b190e)
(SHA1: 462a4309fabc02abf6f3470c5223f0aea44e2a05)
(SHA1: 433590f2c132e0040b13d1c21a2bf55eead6929c)
(SHA1: bcfdf3212e461baaa5922193faa1aec2bfffbb9c)
(SHA1: 66f8fca5793034fc42032f70de7f9195e4bb4bcd)
Some people reported compilation probems with ssss-0.5. This will be fixed in the upcoming release. If the code isn't processed correctly on your machine, replace line 351 of ssss.c by
int restore_secret(int n, void *A, mpz_t b[])
A manpage is available as groff and html version.
Read the HISTORY file for the changes between the versions. There exists a debian package for ssss. New versions are announced via the freshmeat page.
Someone contributed a Windows port of (an outdated version of) ssss (but with a lightly too sloppy random number generation, in my opinion).
The generation of shares given a known secret is shown first. A (3,5)-threshold scheme is used, that is: 5 shares are generated, the secret can be reconstructed by any subset of size 3.
% ssss-split -t 3 -n 5 Generating shares using a (3,5) scheme with dynamic security level. Enter the secret, at most 128 ASCII characters: my secret root password Using a 184 bit security level. 1-1c41ef496eccfbeba439714085df8437236298da8dd824 2-fbc74a03a50e14ab406c225afb5f45c40ae11976d2b665 3-fa1c3a9c6df8af0779c36de6c33f6e36e989d0e0b91309 4-468de7d6eb36674c9cf008c8e8fc8c566537ad6301eb9e 5-4756974923c0dce0a55f4774d09ca7a4865f64f56a4ee0
% ssss-combine -t 3 Enter 3 shares separated by newlines: Share [1/3]: 3-fa1c3a9c6df8af0779c36de6c33f6e36e989d0e0b91309 Share [2/3]: 5-4756974923c0dce0a55f4774d09ca7a4865f64f56a4ee0 Share [3/3]: 2-fbc74a03a50e14ab406c225afb5f45c40ae11976d2b665 Resulting secret: my secret root password
If larger secrets are to be shared a hybrid technique has to be applied: encrypt the secret with a block cipher (using openssl, gpg, etc) and apply secret sharing to just the key. See the man page for more information about this topic.
seccure is another crypto software by the same author.


text:
The Internet can be a terrible
place, especially when you have been targeted by a pack of rabid hyenas,
hell-bent on ripping your good name and professional reputation to shreds. It
wouldn't be so bad if these assailants were interested in ISSUES. Let's say,
if they disagree with my "politics" --defender of Liberty and God-given
unalienable Individual rights as protected and guaranteed under the U.S.
Constitution. Period. Or, my "religion" -- devout Christian, believer in the
Gospel of Jesus Christ. Period.
But no, the "issues" seem
to be meaningless for those launching their vile personal attacks against
Barbara Hartwell. They're out for blood, and they don't give a damn what they
have to say, how many outrageous lies they have to tell --in print-- to get it.
Let it bleed!
Recently, someone I've
been working with to expose the COINTELPRO operations which are
literally destroying people's lives (not just mine, but many others), after
putting my name into a search engine, commented to me, Man, they really hate
you! He was actually shocked to see what was out there,
every kind of filthy smear imaginable --and not a word of it based on facts or
truth. And forget the issues...nobody cares.
As I've often explained in
my reports, COINTELPRO exploits rank amateurs, a loosely organized network of
minions and stooges, who do much of the dirty work in smearing Targets, by
parroting the outrageous lies originally fabricated by government operatives
intent on discrediting the Target.
I've exposed these stooges
by name, and refuted their lies, time and time again, over a period of more
years than I care to remember. But in their aggressive nature, they just keep
coming back, repeating the same old lies (often adding variations to the
fabrications) and spewing their white-hot hate.
James F. Marino is one of a
gaggle of government stooges who has been spreading outrageous and
malicious lies in his attacks against Barbara Hartwell --in Marino's case,
since 2007.
The way it looks to me is that he is never going to stop, until one way or another, he is forced to stop --which is why, on principle, I make sure I continue to expose him and periodically refute his lies. This is my policy in regard to anyone who has engaged in character assassination and defamation, until such time (if ever --and it's not likely) that these perps REMOVE all libelous material from their websites. I keep documenting their offenses and the mounting damages, for the public record.
Marino is an oh-so-typical
example of the government stooge: An extremely aggressive busybody,
gate-crasher, name-dropper and belligerent ignoramus, who has taken it upon
himself to write about subjects (and people) about which he claims knowledge he
does not possess.
Marino first came out of the
woodwork (to my knowledge) around 2006, when he began his attempts to ride the
coattails of former FBI agent Geral Sosbee and Barbara Hartwell, claiming that
he was a "target" of COINTELPRO. Marino was dropping our names all over the place, even
plagiarizing our work, as well as writing articles about us which contained
much false information, based on nothing but his own subjective opinions, wild
speculation and erroneous suppositions, and which displayed his
profound ignorance, not only of our professional backgrounds and current work,
but also his dearth of knowledge relating to the very counterintelligence
operations of which Geral and I, as FBI/CIA whistleblowers, have been longtime
Targets. Geral and I have been
working together to expose and fight government corruption, criminality and
massive human rights violations for over a decade, and he is my best
In a nutshell, James Marino
tried to attach himself to us and to promote his so-called "case" by exploiting
our names. But what he ended up doing (as busybodies always, always do), was
causing a world of trouble by his unconscionable meddling, in conjunction with
spouting off, in his profound ignorance, on the various issues Geral and I deal
In addition, Marino's politics
(leftist, collectivist and a communist sympathizer, who heavily promoted the
usurper "president", Barack Hussein Obama aka Barry Soetoro, voted for him, made
campaign contributions, and publicly celebrated his "victory" in the 2008
election --all of which he later denied), are diametrically opposed to what we
believe in and fiercely defend: God-given unalienable Individual rights, as
protected and guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution.
After a couple years of
Marino's attempts to exploit us and ride our coattails, we had had enough! We
asked him politely (at first) in a public notice (2007), to stop using our
names; stop writing about us; stop invading our privacy; stop promoting false
information (based mostly on his own false assumptions), which was damaging to
our personal/professional reputations, as well as to our efforts to expose the
truth about what we had personally witnessed, experienced and investigated, none
of which was related to James Marino (or his claims) in any
But being what I call the
Archetypal Busybody, instead of having the decency and common courtesy
to respect our wishes, to respect our privacy and our clearly-drawn personal
boundaries, Marino foolishly interpreted our efforts to get him to simply LEAVE
US ALONE, to stop his meddling and exploitation of our names for his own
agenda, as wrongdoing on OUR part, and started attacking us. Geral Sosbee and
I have been called a variety of nasty names and accused of every dirty trick in
the book, simply because this government stooge, James Marino, had a temper
tantrum when his own ignorance and unscrupulous interference had not been
tolerated by us.
In typical government stooge
fashion, Marino then brought forth his accusations that Geral and I are
"government agents". (Where have we heard that before? That's right, from
Marino's fellow stooges...) Worse, he actually went so far as to accuse us of
"targeting" HIM for some evil government agenda.
Since James Marino
started his libel campaign in 2007,
he has been repeatedly warned to stop, to cease and desist, in public reports
which expose his offenses. But instead, he obsessively continues his
cowardly attacks (often not using our names, but using inference and
innuendo) and has posted permanent links to his own libelous articles in the
sidebar of his website, as well as those of his accomplices, whose
outrageous lies he simply parrots, having nothing of substance, but only his own
malice, to fuel his ignorant attacks on Barbara Hartwell.
Like most of his fellow
stooges, James Marino does not know Barbara Hartwell. He has never had any
contact with me, never spoken to me, never exchanged as much as one e-mail with
me. I had never heard of him until I saw my name being bandied about in his
articles (2006). Yet his idiocy knows no bounds, in making statements for which
he has no evidence whatsoever, and certainly no knowledge of what the hell he is
talking about.
Just to be clear on the nature
of some of Marino's "sources", here are just a few: Ken Adachi aka Peter
Boudreau, primary PR shill for the late FBI Chief and COINTELPRO Kingpin, Ted
L. Gunderson; "Xena Carpenter", one of many aliases used by forger, identity
thief, blackmailer, sex predator, stalker, Todd Brendan Fahey (and whose website
"Xena Carpenter" runs libel campaigns against legitimate whistleblowers and
journalists); Timothy Patrick White, career criminal, predicate felon, notorious
stalker, sex predator, child porno freak; Aaron James, who falsely accused
Barbara Hartwell of being a "CIA Agent" who "targets our family", and posted a
number of sensationalistic tabloid-style videos slandering/libeling Barbara
Hartwell, and which to this day appear on PAGE ONE of Google search for my
name. (Of course, that's the very point of a COINTELPRO campaign against a
Great sources, Marino! What a
marvy bunch of folks! All of your ilk, all cowards and malicious liars, and
all of whom take pleasure is doing harm to innocent people who have done them no
Here is just one of James F.
Marino's many articles, smearing Barbara Hartwell. Marino's M.O. is to keep
editing the same piece over and over, so that it changes with the seasons, with
the latest lies being promoted by his fellow stooges, or perhaps, if no
new sordid gossip is available, his own latest spiteful
My comments are in brackets,
preceded by my initials, BHP. I have REMOVED a false name which Marino
(parroting his fellow stooges, Tim White, Todd Brendan Fahey aka "Xena
Carpenter", as usual) has attributed to me and replaced it with
[Note for the record: My
"legal" name is "Barbara Hartwell". It appears on all documents, licenses,
etc. I also use "Percival", which is my family name, by bloodline. I have no
other names, nor have ever used other names. The stooges who are attempting to
discredit me think they can do so by claiming I am not using my "real" name,
just one of many falsehoods they have fabricated.]
CIA Disinfo Agent Barbara [XXX] Hartwell Also Exposed As An FBI Provocateur Who Aids & Abets The FBI COINTELPRO Against This Author
Editor's Note: The hyperlink's section which this
author maintains on the right side of this blog includes a link to the following
report on CIA disinfo miscreant Barbara [XXX] Hartwell. This link is routinely
electronically disabled by the FBI/NSA team of miscreants, who protect [XXX]
Hartwell. Why would the FBI protect Barbara [XXX] Hartwell? Because [XXX]
Hartwell is an FBI snitch, and one of myriad provocateurs whom the FBI has used
in its long-term COINTELPRO against this author.
[BHP: Firstly, it is laughable and
ludicrous that James Marino actually seems to believe that he would be a "person
of interest" to any government agency. He is not a whistleblower, nor even any
kind of legitimate journalist, and he has never "exposed" anything which could
possibly be a threat to any government agency. He is simply a scavenger
who parrots and plagiarizes the work of others --some legitimate, some not-- and
adds his own wild speculation and 'spin' to the mix. He is not doing anything
but shooting his mouth off , and like other stooges of his ilk, he is
apparently so stupid, so filled with delusions of his own "importance", that he
doesn't realize that he himself is being exploited by the very feds he claims
have "targeted" him. But then, that is the classic tactic, it is how COINTELPRO
Marino claims I am a "FBI snitch". No Marino,
why don't you look more closely at your "sources", like Tim White, for example.
There's a REAL FBI snitch for you, one who made a deal with the feds for a
get-out-of-jail-free card, in exchange for his harassment, stalking, threats,
libel/slander of patriots and
whistleblowers, including Barbara Hartwell.
Marino, the useful idiot, is in point of fact,
by attacking Sosbee and Hartwell, "aiding and abetting" the very feds he claims
to despise, and to be "exposing". ]
"This is also the reason why [XXX] Hartwell never posts anything derogatory in regard to the FBI or NSA, since she doesn't want to bite the hand that feeds her. This is also further proof that [XXX]Hartwell is a complete fraud as a government whistle blower, who in reality protects many of the Intel community's criminals, and as such has lost all credibility with the whistle blowing community."
[BHP: Now here's a perfect example of Marino's
gross ignorance! He claims I "never post anything derogatory" about the FBI or
NSA? In fact, anyone who goes to my website may see the hundreds of articles
EXPOSING government corruption, in these agencies and others, including those
written by former FBI agent Geral Sosbee, who happens to be the foremost
whistleblower in U.S. history, exposing the truth about the FBI.
Now, as usual, this low-grade moron,
Marino, claims to have "proof" of his own spiteful fabrications about Barbara
Hartwell. What "proof"? Proof can be established only by indisputable facts,
supported by hard evidence -- where is it , Marino? Where's the proof? If you
had anything except your own malicious lies and idle speculation, you would
certainly have presented it by now. Case closed.
And how, pray tell, would Marino know anything
about the so-called "whistle blowing community"? He's not a part of any such
entity himself, nor does any legitimate person I've ever known or even heard
about endorse a buffoon like Marino.]
"[XXX] Hartwell is blowing smoke; not
offering anything of substance in regard to the Intel community's inherent
criminality. [XXX] Hartwell is a despicable liar."
[BHP: Says who? You, James Marino, busybody and government
"The FBI Uses Barbara [XXX] Hartwell In An Attempt To Get This Author's Blog Deleted"
"Today I posted this report, which once again
exposed James F. Marino, a malicious liar and government stooge who has been
attacking Barbara Hartwell since 2007."
[BHP: I have never, at any time, attempted to
get Marino's blog deleted. However, I am repeatedly accused of same (in
collusion with the "feds" or "Intel", naturally), and not only that, but blamed
by Marino for all kinds of other mishaps and problems he claims are happening to
him. As for my statement, quoted by Marino above, that is the only
truthful statement in this whole smear piece against Barbara
-- CIA Disinfo Agent/ Incarnated Evil Barbara [XXX]
"Rather than waste any further time on this piece
of CIA disinfo garbage, the following articles speak volumes in regard to
Barbara [XXX] Hartwell and the Intel cesspool that she hails from, yet falsely
claims to despise."
[BHP: This refers to smear pieces by Marino's
fellow stooges, evidence of exactly what I have stated: that having nothing of
his own (except his delusional fantasies), Marino uses the libelous material of
others, thinking he can "prove" his point about the "CIA Disinfo
Agent/Incarnated Evil" Barbara Hartwell.]
"This lowlife miscreant has been using her blog in which to provoke this author into the type of swill bashing that characterizes the entire existence of someone like [XXX] Hartwell. [XXX] Hartwell is a miscreant's miscreant - a lowlife thug who is still doing the Intel community's dirty work for them and collecting a paycheck for it, which is why after more than five consecutive years of claiming poverty, [XXX] Hartwell still has enough disposable income to afford Internet access - a luxury; when she claims that she can't even afford food."
[BHP: All I ever wanted regarding Marino is for
him to GET OFF MY CASE --the same thing I want when it comes to every last one
of these aggressive busybody government stooges and lackeys. I'd be very happy
never to hear of any of them again! But when they keep on attacking me, I am
accused of "provoking" them when I expose their idiocy and defend my good name
against their calumny. How very typical.
Again, little Mr. Marino engages in wild
speculation, this time about my finances -- which, by the way, are NONE OF YOUR
DAMNED BUSINESS, Busybody Marino!
That's right, as I have stated in some of my
reports, it's true that there have been times when I was actually going hungry,
since I could not afford to buy groceries. I've never had anyone I could rely on
for help, haven't had any form of reliable material support, and unfortunately
for me, all this was a result of the government's neutralization campaign
against me. I could have starved, for all anyone cared, and there were times I
had to sell some of my possessions (including my furniture) just to put food on
the table.
So that's right, Marino, it would just figure
that a rich spoiled brat like you, a fiftyish "man" (I use the term loosely),
who by his own admission, is still living with (and living OFF) his elderly
parents (whom he complains about in his own writings, for "threatening" to throw
him out their house), who does not work for a living, would accuse a person like
me, just trying to survive, of collecting a government
And by the way, did you know WHY I have been
forced to live in such a state of poverty and deprivation? Because scumbags like
you, who participate in the libel/slander campaigns, have ruined my good name
and reputation to such an extent that not only has it effectively stopped me
from getting support in the form of donations from the public, but has made it nearly impossible for me
to do business with anyone who puts my name into a search engine. Reading the
outrageous lies from people like you, they head for the hills, screaming,
Evil Government Agent! BEWARE!]
"Who even takes this liar seriously anymore? I've lost
count of [XXX] Hartwell's lies, and so have her detractors, who include
virtually every person foolish enough to have ever taken [XXX] Hartwell
seriously in the first place.
She lies about everything, including having
a graduate degree when she never even finished college, and still lacks an
undergraduate degree. She also lies about owning a home which she doesn't, and
still expects to be taken seriously?
Who the hell is [XXX] Hartwell trying to kidd?"
[BHP: Now, busybody and malicious gossip Marino once
again parrots the lies being promoted by his fellow
FACT: I have never "lied" about having a
graduate degree. Nor is it true that I "never even finished college". This
particular lie was fabricated by Todd Brendan Fahey, hiding behind the
alias "Xena Carpenter", and was then posted all over the
Internet by busybody stooges Tim White, Ken Adachi, Alex Studer. and many
These demonic liars also claimed that I
"attended NYU but never graduated." Well no, I never "graduated" from
NYU...the logical reason being that I NEVER ATTENDED NYU to begin with.
I have no idea where these
idiots came up with their "information", all I know is that morons like you,
James F. Marino, have made a mission of spreading these lies all over the place,
and stating them AS IF THEY WERE FACTS, which they most certainly are
Next, Marino parrots the lie, which he thinks he
"knows", about my PRIVATE business regarding the ownership of my home. What are
Marino's "sources" for this particular lie? (one which I have refuted many times)
The demonic duo, Todd Brendan Fahey (aka "Xena Carpenter") and Tim White, once
And again, it is NONE OF YOUR DAMNED BUSINESS,
Busybody Marino, about the ownership of my home, nor any other aspect of my
personal life. That too, is a PRIVATE matter, and the monstrous invasions of my
privacy, in conjunction with all the lies, have resulted in massive damages to
me and those associated with me, all because of a gaggle of demonic liars and
aggressive busybodies.]
"And these are just some of the harmless lies that
[XXX] Hartwell has told, which don't include the myriad of absolutely vicious
lies which she has promulgated in an attempt to destroy people's
[BHP: Can he be serious? I'm afraid so...he has
the audacity to accuse me of being a "liar" (about my PRIVATE business, no less)
and "destroying people's lives"? You need to look much closer to home, you
despicable little worm, if you want to talk about that. Try MINDING YOUR OWN
DAMNED BUSINESS for a change.]
"Moreover, [XXX] Hartwell operates in the typical Intel fashion of avoiding any exculpatory information which serves to prove that she is lying. What a surprise! Especially when she is being used as a provocateur in which to provoke someone into acting out in a way which can give an organization like the FBI a plausible reason for arresting them.
That is the sole purpose of a provocateur - to provoke.
And here, [XXX] Hartwell has found her niche as both a provocateur and
propagator of red herrings - anything but the truth."
[BHP: "Exculpatory information"? What the hell
is this idiot talking about? Is he reading too many legal thrillers?
Unfortunately for you, Marino, you are the one being "used" but you are far too
stupid to see it.]
"Disinfo Barbara - Queen Of The
What her detractors long ago
realized about her, is that Barbara [XXX] Hartwell is a puppet whose "strings"
are clearly being pulled by her Intel handlers. Which is why no one in the
alternative media trusts a word that she says any longer, and shunned her long
ago. A smart move, since they also understand that [XXX] Hartwell is dangerous,
and still maintains ties to some very unsavory characters within the Intel
BHP: Lastly, we have the usual pompous
pontificating by this pretentious parading idiot, James F. Marino. He issues
a warning to all and sundry about the "dangerous" Desperado Hartwell and her
outlaw accomplices in the Intel community!
James Marino:
If your life is truly so dull and uneventful
that your only source of excitement is cooking up tall tales about
unsavory spooks, feds, and bogeymen that don't exist --at least not outside of
your delusional fantasies-- then, if not for your malicious attacks against
me and my friends, I might be tempted to pity you.
You have exposed yourself not only as an
aggressive busybody, trying to live vicariously by scavenging off the efforts of
legitimate people who are ACTUAL TARGETS for neutralization by a corrupt fed
government --but you also are clearly a pathetic, cowardly loser, whose only
source of ego-gratification seems to be launching attacks on the very people who will
continue to work to save this country from destruction by your collectivist
friends and "heroes" --or die trying.
Get a life, Marino, and leave the rest of us
Barbara Hartwell Percival
April 28, 2012
Barbara Hartwell Percival
Legal Defense & Research Trust
Legal Defense & Research Trust
Hartwell Vs. CIA